Returning to Ash
by He Who Writes Monsters
Summary: A Yoma remembers, deep inside, what it once was, and that knowledge is all the more maddening. A Yoma hungers, deep inside, for sustenance of all sorts, and can never be sated. Part 1 of The Colour of a Monster


It hungers – a roiling void that cannot be filled, a desperate desire beyond its control. Aches travel through sturdy bones, tremors through the flesh and muscle that cover them. Shuddering breaths, leaving clouds of vapour in the early morning chill, rumble from a mouth made to devour.

It is cold, so cold, out here, huddled by itself on featureless rock plateau. It doesn't know how it got here, doesn't know... Fragments of memory taunt it, tantalisingly out of reach, glimpses of a child, but it cannot recall his face. At length, it rises, guided more by instinct than rational thought, and lumbers, with footsteps heavier than it expected, into the distance.

The first smell comes soon after, a faint promise on the wind, warm and inviting, and its slow shuffle changes to a loping, ranging stride, one that feels natural. It is learning, slowly, that the desires that assail it help to guide it. Closer, the smell is stronger, and tells him more – four people, a horse and a herd of cattle – a large bull and its sweet cows and suckling calves. It salivates without knowing, thick tongue running over fangs, and the aches in its bones sing for release. It breaks into a sprint, wind in its face, and launches itself into a pounce as the first animals catch its scent and panic. One handler moves to soothe them, sees it falling from the sky like a squat, dark thunderbolt, and screams. It lands on him, one fist turning his chest to pulp, and roars. The column gives into panic, and with eyes slit, hissing deeply, it gave in to its first hunger, wading through a sea of violence.

When his senses came back to him, his first thought was this: _I am naked._ His second was to look at the blood, turning green grass red and brown. He could feel it staining his hands up to the elbow, smeared over his body, caked to the roof of his mouth, the back of his throat, his tongue and teeth – a copper-tang stench that threatened to choke him. _What happened?_ A faint shiver moved through him, his body sighing in contentment, and he fell to his knees. The broken corpses of men and beast alike were scattered over the dirt path, with gaping chunks torn out of them, and more than a few sporting a jagged line across their bellies, intestines spilling out across the ground. At his feet lay the bull, one horn snapped off, and its entrails spread across his feet... his feet! Grey-blue in hue, each one almost the size of the bull's head, and sporting four large toes ending in talons. His arms, likewise, were huge, with five clawed fingers, black with dried blood. _What is this? What happened?_ He put his head in his hands, warm tears escaping his eyes and worming their way down through dried gore. Curling fingers into fists, he grit his teeth, and tried to remember.

He could recall the ruins of a building, torn apart by the hunger of a monster. He could remember a demon wearing his mother's skin, bearing down on his father as he screamed at him to run. He could remember his sister crying as the creature crawled towards them, telling them in a sing-song voice that it was going to eat them. He could remember it holding him down, mouth stretching wide, a yawning abyss of row upon row of teeth, before the sword went through its head, showered his face with pungent purple blood. He remembered the silver-eyed woman casting a dispassionate, clinical gaze over the destruction of his life, and turning away without as much as a flicker of emotion. And then... and then... this. This same grey-black skin, this same bestial strength, this same hunger. I am a monster. _How? Why?_ Looking through the cracks between his fingers, he saw once more the slaughter he had caused, and felt his stomach twist. _I don't want to see this... don't want to be here..._

Abandoning the roadside abattoir, he retreated into a forest. A sapling tree in his way was uprooted and tossed aside, a moss-covered rock smashed to pieces, undergrowth trampled and torn. His vision blurred with tears, his ears filled with relentless ringing, and harsh, choking, inhuman sobs issued from his twisted mouth. The animals of the forest, witnessing the crazed behemoth rampaging through their homes and wailing like nothing human, fled, and hoped, as much as any prey can, that it did not see them.

His anger and despair extinguished itself some time afterwards, leaving him curiously numb. Trudging through the ruined forest, he came to a pool, saw his face for the first time – large golden eyes, dilated pupils swimming in the honey of his irises; flat nose and hog's ears, a tusked maw, rude imitation of a mouth. There is no time left, or space remaining within him, to feel regret for his actions. Look to the present, look to the future. Thrusting both hands in the pool, he scrubbed the gore and filth from his arms, and continued until his body was relatively clean, and the pool was tinged red.

_I'm going home. I need to go home. My sister is waiting for me._ Home was by the sea, at the mouth of a river. Follow a river, and he'd find his way. Lumbering to his feet, he took a deep breath, and over the heady, soiled stench of the forest and the blood further afield, he could smell the sharp, mouth-watering scent of spices. Spices meant traders, and traders went to large cities, cities built near rivers. He's certain he won't hurt them. Won't... won't be the monster he looks like. He just wants to go home.

For four days, he follows them, keeping his distance and ensuring he sleeps in secure locations. He can smell them constantly, and catches himself salivating, horrified by the implications. Attempts to fill his stomach with fruits and grasses are useless. Catching rabbits and foxes likewise do nothing to stem his all-consuming hunger. They go limp under his touch, and break far too easily – he can remember touching things before, squeezing and caressing, without crushing them, or leaving jagged wounds at the passing of a fingertip. His stomach groans with want, need, but he refuses to indulge it with the meat it wants.

On the fifth night, it awakens, and reason is cast to the winds. Advancing through the night, the veil of darkness no obstacle to its senses, it approaches the impromptu fort the traders have made. It growls softly to itself at the complacency of the guards – a single pair huddled around a small fire. Dropping to all fours, certain to keep out of the light, it stalks towards the ring of palisades that make a perimeter around the wagons. The air, still and hot and heavy, cannot conceal its scent, and the horses and oxen shriek and low. One guard abandons his post, running to a certain favoured horse. The other, watching his companion, does not see the gangly-limbed shape detach itself from the shadows, rising up from the long grass, and cannot make a sound before a fist curls around his head and drags him back sharply. As light as a ragdoll, his neck snaps and he vanishes into the shadows. Retreating with its prize to a safe spot high on broken rocks, it devours, it consumes. It is content.

He wakes knowing immediately what he has done, what he tried to stop but failed to. The corpse, hollowed out, lies behind him. I cannot stop this. I cannot control this hunger. He sits there for a time, lets his despair leak out and fade away. Purely despair now, no fury. No childish tantrum with monstrous strength. He remembers a story a woman told him once – don't stay out after night, or the Yoma will come to eat you. They like small children – they eat their guts for sustenance, and their brains to see their sins, then hide in their bodies to perform evil deeds. I am a Yoma. I am a monster. But I want to go home.

He shadows the caravan again, noting that the number of guards are increased, and never move in groups of less than three. One day, a group of riders set forth to seek more guards. He ambushes them, without remorse. Their lives do not matter to him, he is a monster – all that matters is that he goes home. After feeding on them, he slides a talon over the scalp of one, and plucks the greasy, soft grey treasure that lies within. It is bitter to taste, but sweet at the same time – a lifetime's worth of sated hungers rush through his mind in a few moments, become his. An idea forms, born from the chapped lips and rasping voice of an old woman, and he grabs the mound of skin and flesh and bones that was once a human.

One rider returns from the three sent – honest, dependable Jarrek, mumbling in his slow, deep voice that the "damned monster was waiting for us. Got to get to town – quick as possible." Under his skin, watching with his eyes and speaking with his mouth, he thought only to get to the sea. Over the next few days, he preys upon people, shifting from skin to skin, identity to identity. His memories fragment, too many to hold. He remembers his sister, his house, the Claymore. Those are the lifeline within the storm his mind has become, the anchor that holds him to a fixed point. Two weeks after he first woke as this, the trading company is dead aside from him, though they do live within him – instilling within him new hungers. All of them pale before one – the desire to see his home, his sister, the truth. Ahead of him, stretching far into the distance, is the great blue road of water that will lead him to this desire. He looks at the river, and for this one moment, is content.

A/N:

So, my first foray into the Claymoreverse, from the (slightly fanon-ified) POV of a regular newborn Yoma - not an Awakened Being, just a simple Yoma. I'm aiming to make a series out of this and two sister-fics that detail events at the same time as this from different POVs. Warning in advance that there will be OCs, but considering this is a story that has no relevance to the main plot of Claymore, and none of the characters will come into contact with Canon characters, it'll avoid most of those OC cliches we know and hate!

So... If you like it, please review! Reviews make me update faster. If you don't like it, please tell me what you didn't like, so I can avoid making the same mistake inadvertantly.


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